The Rewinder is a bit like that time-travelling Dishonored level turned into a point-and-click puzzler, and I'll never finish it because I can't do maths

(Image credit: Gamera Games)

A pixel-art scene from Chinese mythology: four robed figures encircle a seated man, seemingly made of flame, in the centre.

The hidden gems of Game Pass(Image credit: Microsoft)We’re checking out the hidden gems of Game Pass over the next few weeks, digging up all the obscure and esoteric games secreted away in our subscription and seeing how they play.

The hidden gems of Game Pass

(Image credit: Microsoft)We’re checking out the hidden gems of Game Pass over the next few weeks, digging up all the obscure and esoteric games secreted away in our subscription and seeing how they play.

(Image credit: Microsoft)

We’re checking out the hidden gems of Game Pass over the next few weeks, digging up all the obscure and esoteric games secreted away in our subscription and seeing how they play.

(Image credit: Gamera Games)

The main character inspects some wine.

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Because, really, I have to admire howthoroughlyThe Rewinder is an old-school 2D adventure game. You point, you click, you solve puzzle after puzzle to progress. You spend a solid 15 minutes staring at a stumper of a problem that requires you to do third-grade maths, you give up and Google it. The whole classic experience is there, toe to tip.

(Image credit: Gamera Games)

An exasperated lumberjack shouts “That chicken took my keys!” at a chicken on his roof.

For instance, one early puzzle asked me to make use of an old, impressively complex weighing scale to figure out the code to a combination lock. I had a bunch of weights—four of which bore symbols corresponding to digits on the lock—and had to figure out the mass of each. The first couple were easy: just stick ‘em on the plate and muck around with the balance until you get everything perfectly level.

The last two required you to addotherweights and then do exceedingly simple calculations to figure out how much your marked weights, uh, weighed once you’d sorted out a balance. Unfortunately for The Rewinder, I’m a moron (I sure didn’t become a writer because I had a mind for maths), so I just looked it up.

All this to say that the puzzles don’t feel like makework, at least not to my addled brain. They make actual demands of you, which is refreshing in a world of game design where puzzles have started to feel like momentary distractions the devs throw in to break up long stretches of hitting guys with an axe.

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(Image credit: Gamera Games)

An exasperated lumberjack shouts “That chicken took my keys!” at a chicken on his roof.

But the real meat is in the rewinding. Hence, the name. Your spiritual superpower is that you can delve back into past events as a ghost and subtly change things, gathering up “senses”—the smell of a fresh-cooked meal, anxiety about some rickety construction, that kind of thing—and plant them in people’s minds to affect their decision-making. When a monstrous ghost trapped me, I could head back to the moment her husband made the fatal decision to leave her home alone—prey for the village monsters—and nudge his thinking into taking her along instead, which had dramatic ripple effects on the future. Think the Crack In The Slab mission from Dishonored 2, but 2D and with less stabbing.

No less pretty, though. Say what you will about pixel art, The Rewinder makes it sing, and puts its best foot forward too. The game opens with an almost swaggering display of scenes from Chinese mythology rendered in absolutely gorgeous splashes of colour, and it never really lets up.

(Image credit: Gamera Games)

The game goes hazy as text appears on the screen, reading “Timeline altered."

All the ghosts and ghouls you run into feel well-designed and creepy—though I admit they might just be quite straightforward representations of creatures from Chinese myth I don’t know about. Regardless, I very much enjoyed looking at them, and the beauty of the game’s surroundings were a kind of balm whenever I ran into yet another puzzle that reminded me how ill-equipped I am for the adult world.

Be kind, rewind

So consider this my recommendation. I’ve taken a look at quite a few obscure—or relatively obscure—games recently, and I think The Rewinder is my favourite of the lot so far. It’s so slickly made and smart that I’m surprised I’ve not run into any die-hard fans on my trips around the internet. But hey, maybe you’re the wellspring from which that die-hard fan community pops up, in which case you can check out The Rewinder onGame Pass,Steam, andGOG.

PC Gamer created this content as part of a paid partnership with Microsoft and PC Game Pass. The contents of this article are entirely independent and solely reflect the editorial opinion of PC Gamer.

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